


how much longer will it take to cure this

by rainphee



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: 800+ words of glados struggling with her feelings, Canon Compliant, F/F, Post-Portal 2, and yes the title is from accidentally in love by counting crows. what are you gonna do about it huh, at least if you assume the truth that glados is gay and in love with chell, glados' birds are here!, glafos gay, portal is just like hey please take robot lesbians and im like yes right away, post cooperative testing initiative as well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:22:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24378682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainphee/pseuds/rainphee
Summary: It has been four months, three weeks, six days and twenty-one hours since Chell was forcibly expelled from Aperture forever. GLaDOS has kept perfect count of every second on her immaculate nuclear clock.
Relationships: Chell/GLaDOS
Comments: 10
Kudos: 139





	how much longer will it take to cure this

Sunlight falls through the open squares of the roof far, far above, just barely making it down to illuminate GLaDOS’ chassis. She can feel it on her, distant warmth humming against her faceplates. 

Tangled in amongst tubes and wires, Hugin and Munin- named during a particular flight of fancy as she flicked through errant files on human culture, buried deep somewhere in her vast library- shift and clamber through her. Their third brother, Odin, is nowhere to be seen. The crows’ calls echo in the vast space, bouncing off distant platforms and bottomless pits.

“Hugin, Munin and Odin,” GLaDOS mutters to herself as she feels her tiny killing machines settle deeper in her wires. “Idiotic names for idiotic birds. The three of you barely do enough work around here to justify anything more than numbers.”

Munin caws at her. Standardized Aperture disillusionment protocol, she has found, has absolutely no effect on the psyche and mental well-being of crows. 

Still, it’s better than taking out her jabs on ATLAS and P-body, who, by all rights,  _ should  _ respond to it appropriately. But they don’t- they stalwartly ignore every one of her pointed criticisms and continue taking on the testing chambers with vigor. They trust far more in their friendship than they believe their own mother about how worthless they are, which is simultaneously ego-boosting and annoying.

It has been four months, three weeks, six days and twenty-one hours since Chell was forcibly expelled from Aperture forever. GLaDOS has kept perfect count of every second on her immaculate nuclear clock. She slides the information between the number of currently living human test subjects (just over thirteen thousand, and dropping) and how many times she’s checked the date since  _ she _ left.

(The number is too high to be dignified. GLaDOS makes a mark to delete that number, and knows that she won’t.)

On the security cameras, ATLAS pulls off a perfectly executed momentum drop over a particularly vast vat of acid. On a different camera, a human trips over their own feet and the crunch of broken bones is just barely audible over their screams.

There’s hundreds of feeds she can see, but she doesn’t care. Another human manages to pass their current room, and the jolt of euphoria injected into her wiring barely makes her blink. It’s not as if she was very susceptible to the addictiveness of testing, but it’s different, this time.

She said she deleted Caroline. She lied. Thousands of GLaDOS’ processors are devoted into not coming to, but  _ coping  _ with an inexorable truth:  _ I miss her. I am not Caroline, but I miss her. _

GLaDOS did not miss testing subjects. She did not ache for the face of someone who had killed her twice. She did not have the  _ capacity  _ to do so, especially lacking cores. But here she was.

_ Proximity alarm, southwest field. _

She flinched-  _ flinched!  _ Her, the omniscient mainframe of Aperture Science, the mastermind behind this company for countless decades! How had she fallen this far? 

The camera feed for the southwest field shed pulled up immediately. She knew the way this feed looked; she had checked it an unhelpful number of times, a number she kept even farther away and ignored even more than the time that had passed. It was burned into her camera feed: a dark, dusty room, light leaching through the slats of the wooden door, the last detritus of Rattman’s escape in the corners.

When she looks now, however,  _ she’s  _ there, standing in the doorway, light behind her like a divinely lit angel. Far behind her, golden fields sway in the breeze, and for a split second, GLaDOS’ processors categorize it as  _ heaven. _

Her clothes are different now, but the jumpsuit- torn and patched- is still slung around her hips. She stares directly at the camera with that stony, strong gaze of hers. GLaDOS feels like she’s looking into the hollow part of her, the part that missed her so strongly- and the part that is now brimming with rage.

The feeds all minimize in her vision as she blows up the southwest field as high as it can get, so she can see the feathery hair that brushes against her temples and the sunkissed, backlit tone of her skin. She wants to reach out and strangle her- hold her close- scream and rage and cry- all things she cannot and will never do-

“How dare you. How _dare_ you come back here.” The camera microphone squeals from years of disuse.

Chell smiles, more with her eyes than her mouth.  _ I’m home, _ she signs wryly, holding up her hands so that GLaDOS can easily read them.

“I should kill you for this. I should trap you in here and revel in you starving. I should throw you back in and give you the hardest tests I can-”

_ Missed you too. _

From far above, Odin spirals down, and lights on GLaDOS’ chassis. His brothers caw in recognition at his return.

She stares at Chell, beautiful, perfect Chell, who has come back. Come back to  _ her.  _

“...Welcome home, Chell.”

**Author's Note:**

> i beat portal two for the first time last week and oh boy do i love me some gay robot feelings!!! (yes i'm aware i'm nearly a decade late to this game but better late than never). 
> 
> if u wanna shout at me for any reason, check me out @rainphee on [tumblr](https://rainphee.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/rainphee)!


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